Discerning Catholicism: Part 03


Early Sunday morning, I watched the Daily TV Mass (above). Then during my walk, I listened to the following talks:






This was a powerful series and there is much for me to reflect on here. Part of my discernment of Catholicism is the approach of Catholic bishops to the climate crisis and the underlying problem of ecological overshoot, which has been driven by human overpopulation and industrial livestock production. While deforestation and land degradation may only account for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the net effect of deforestation on the climate system is greatly compounded by the accompanying loss of atmospheric carbon sequestration capacity. When this is taken into account, the importance of vegan, vegetarian, and flexitarian dietary patterns for the protection and expansion of the global forest is underscored. But so is the importance of international population control, and this brings up the issue of family planning and sexual ethics. Here I worry that the Catholic Church and UN human rights leaders have been failing future generations ever since spaceship Earth began to exceed its affluent egalitarian carrying capacity sometime around 1972. Now it looks like we need to implement some form of world one-child policy in order to reach a precautionary world population of 6 billion by 2100 (assuming we can avoid catastrophic collapse and die-off in the meantime).



Maybe I need to start merging Buckminster Fuller's "spaceship Earth" concept into my formal ecclesiology. In what sense is the church the same as spaceship Earth?

According to Google Gemini:

Peter does not explicitly refer to the Church as an ark, but the analogy is commonly drawn from 1 Peter 3:18-22, where the salvation through Noah's ark is paralleled with salvation through baptism. In this passage, Peter explains that the flood saved Noah's family through water, just as baptism now saves believers through the resurrection of Christ. Therefore, the Church is understood as the spiritual "ark" that preserves believers through the water of baptism and keeps them safe during judgment. 

Every ark has its carrying capacity.

On a related front, I clearly need to draw a distinction between pre-industrial anthropogenic global warming, which was probably sufficient to prevent a new ice age, and post-industrial anthropogenic global warming, which may have already locked us in on a course to Hothouse Earth (cf. Hothouse Earth: What Is It and Can We Avoid It?; Global warming in the pipeline | Oxford Open Climate Change | Oxford Academic).


I may be wrong about all of this, of course. Or maybe I am right, and I belong to a school of American Christian prophets that includes Ellen White, and this is just too advanced for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. It would be hard for them to recognize the glaring logical contradictions in Natural Family Planning, the technical and moral superiority of other forms of contraception, and the urgency of reform. Apparently, the vast majority of the lay faithful use contraception and believe it is moral to do so. There is a division in Catholicism since Humanae Vitae (1968) between progressives and traditionalists over the sensus fidelium as it relates to this issue. The traditionalists think that the sensus fidelium here belongs to a celibate clerical magisterium that has been racked for decades by a major sexual abuse crisis - and not to the faithful child-rearing laity. 

By way of contrast, consider the balanced exegesis in Birth Control: A Seventh-Day Adventist Statement of Consensus. And this was written over 25 years ago!

Video list: 

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